


Farscape Ficlets

by pellucid



Category: Farscape
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-24
Updated: 2014-02-24
Packaged: 2018-01-13 14:15:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1229500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pellucid/pseuds/pellucid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of short Farscape fics. Various characters, all gen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ages Hence

**Author's Note:**

> Fics are unconnected to each other, but since they're all short, I thought I'd group them together as a collection. 
> 
> All written in 2006 or 2007.

At the end of her life, after the last fragile peace she's seen brokered has splintered apart, after the last of the children she's midwived has sacrificed himself in the splintering, she returns to the stars to die. 1000 cycles is too much life, even for Chiana.

The leviathan was unlooked for, but Chiana somehow isn't surprised when, her small craft losing fuel, she feels the forgotten, familiar tug of a docking web pulling her home. The ship's name is Cereth, and she does not like passengers in this unstable time, the Pilot says, but she insisted on picking up Chiana.

Cereth is a poet, and a collector of tales, and stories are the only currency Chiana has anymore. For arns at a time the Pilot listens and translates as Chiana remembers, the Nebari Conflicts receding into the great Peacekeeper-Scarran Wars, until a name from the distant past causes the Pilot's eyes to widen and his arms to still, and she feels a throb of excitement from the ship. Moya.

The translation is ineffective, so Cereth herself sings, in hums and pulses and colors, the Ballad of Moya, greatest of leviathans. She who broke free of slavery, who birthed a gunship and arbitrated peace, who navigated wormholes and landed on planets and swam in terrestrial seas. And Chiana's eyes slip closed as she listens and feels in this language she shouldn't understand, her youth rushing forward to meet her in the warm gold of leviathan skin and the brilliance of a starburst.


	2. Goodbye in Pieces

Olivia grieved for him the first time, when she thought he was dead. It was its own kind of agony, but infinitely better than the never knowing that has replaced it. When he left again—after coming back from the dead—it did feel like goodbye. Sort of. Then a few months later Dad got a phone call from the moon. So that became the real goodbye. Maybe.

After John died the first time, she broke up with the IASA scientist she had been dating and took up with a plumber. Blocked pipes never threatened to tear a family apart, never killed anyone. In the aftermath of John's resurrection, she returns to her scientist. She lives for a while in an atmosphere tinged with aliens and wormholes, wild hopes and gripping fears. She can't bring her brother back, nor can she lay him to rest.

In the end, she leaves Florida, the memory of a brother half-alive but never returning, and the keepers of John's legacy. When she marries she abandons the name Crichton. Years ago she criticized Susan for running away, but her sister has the grace not to say I told you so.

Her brother never comes back. She wonders about him from time to time. Is he still the haunted, unfamiliar man who returned so fleetingly? Are the creatures of her nightmares still hunting him? Did he ever give Aeryn Mom's ring? Is he even still alive? 

She always thought she'd know if he died. But she's been wrong about that before.


	3. Gratitude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place between "Self-Inflicted Wounds" and "Different Destinations."

She finds him just outside the town, sitting on the ground, staring across the vivid meadow. The blades of grass are light purple on one side, deep indigo on the other, and as the breeze ripples across the field, Aeryn is reminded of the great body of water on Nimta Prime. John is probably thinking of the ocean on the false Earth, but the color is wrong. Pale yellow flowers dot the view at irregular intervals. She sits down beside him, shoulders touching.

"Hey," he says softly.

"We've got everything we need for Moya's repairs. D'Argo wants to go back soon."

He nods. "I didn't hear you comm me." 

"I didn't."

Neither of them makes any motion to get up. After a few microts, John takes her hand and threads his fingers through hers. This is the sort of planet he loves—warm suns, fresh breeze, plenty of vegetation—and she wishes they had found it under different circumstances. She prefers the emptiness of space, but still, it might have been nice, peaceful even, to stay for a couple of solar days.

"This place would have been just right for her, wouldn't it?" His voice is tight as it breaks the silence. "All these plants."

"Pilot didn't say," she replies. No point in a reminder that they had been too late. But probably, yes, she thinks. It would have been perfect.

Aeryn suddenly feels helpless and weighed down by the planet's gravity. She tries to extract her hand, to get up, to go back to Moya to do something useful, but John tightens his grip. "Frell," she mutters, at him, at herself, at Zhaan.

"'S not your fault, babe." His voice is deceptively calm, but she can see the strain in the taut muscles of his neck. "It was her choice. She knew what she was doing."

"I wouldn't have let her do it. I wish I could have stopped her." 

"I know it's selfish, but I wouldn't have let you stop her, Aeryn. Not that I could have done anything about it just then." He sighs. "And then I screwed it up again with Nialla and the wormhole."

"We're frelling useless, Crichton." She rests her cheek against his shoulder. "You couldn't stop Scorpius's neural clone, I couldn't stop you, and neither of us could stop Zhaan from throwing away her life for us. I told her it was a bad trade."

One of the planet's suns slides out from behind the clouds that had been shielding it, and Aeryn squints against the brightness. The temperature rises quickly, and she fights a wave of nausea as a trickle of sweat runs down the back of her neck. She's absurdly glad they're leaving anyway, that it won't be the heat and her weakness that prevents John from staying.

"It's like being born, I guess," John muses after more microts of silence. She's used to his non sequiturs by now, so she simply waits to see whether the explanation will make any sense. "Nobody asks to be born, you know? And sometimes I think everything would have been a lot easier if I hadn't been. Woulda saved a lot of folks a lot of grief. But it wasn't up to me, and I can't take it back. It was my parents' choice, and I've got to honor that."

Aeryn lifts her head and studies his profile, the familiar lines backlit by the glare of the double suns.

"Zhaan gave you life. And she gave me a reason to live. Like a parent." He pauses. "I don't know whether it was a bad trade or not, but it was her trade to make."

"But your parents didn't give up their lives for you to be born," she counters. "I'm not worth that much."

"Not all parents have to sacrifice so much," he concedes. "But some do. Zhaan loved you. She wanted you to live. I'm glad she did."

She has no response that she hasn't already given. She has no response that would make any difference. Her whole life she's held on to a shard of a memory: a mother who wanted her to be born. That secret always tasted like hope, like flying free. Suddenly it's death and helplessness instead, and she imagines a figure—a woman she barely remembers merged with a familiar Delvian priest—falling from the sky and disappearing in a frozen lake. She shivers despite the heat. 

Her comm crackles to life. "John, Aeryn, where the frell are you?"

"Coming, D'Argo," she replies. She releases John's hand and stands up.

He stands slowly, scanning the horizon as if committing it to memory. Then he stoops down again to pluck one of the flowers, which he hands to her. Up close it has no color at all.


	4. The Young Ones are Wild

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Post-ep for "Mind the Baby"; also spoilers for "The Way We Weren't"

You wish you knew what it is about leviathans that leaves you so unmoored. You're clean for the first time in longer than you can recall with much precision—one solar day extending agonizingly into another as you dealt with John and D'Argo, Crais and Talyn. You should sleep. Cycles of training dictate that you must take advantage of opportunities to rest because you never know when the battle will begin again. Instead, you sit on the floor in the far corner of your cell, your body nestled between Moya's ribs. You're not sure where her ache ends and yours begins.

You've never been certain if the feel of Moya grows steadily fainter because Namtar's procedure takes time to wear off completely or if you're just getting used to it. But you do still feel her, and she has gone through a great deal in the past few weekens: fear, joy, grief. The sense of Moya settles somewhere near the back of your tongue, almost like a taste. Her presence is faint, and if you're not concentrating on her, you don't notice it; when you're away, you're always aware of her absence.

But you can't pretend it started with Namtar. Pilot's DNA has allowed you a unique connection, but leviathans have been threatening your downfall for cycles. You try not to think of Velorek much. You were dangerously near the edge then, much more so than you realized at the time. When you think of it at all, you blame the leviathan: everything was fine once you got back on prowler detail.

Three cycles later, another leviathan, and your life is completely unhinged. You and Tauvo Crais both lost your lives that day, good pilots thwarted by wormholes and starbursts.

On the first leviathan, with Velorek, you glimpsed an abyss and scrambled away just in time. This time, there is nowhere to scramble, and you're pretty sure you're already falling. This evening, you were a little lost and a little found, and as long as you didn't think too much about it, it felt good to let John hold you. 

You have changed in this crazy cycle since you flew a few metras too close to a leviathan. You have learned about love, this vague sentiment you've suspected your whole life, and you find it fitting and not a little ironic that the first being you've learned to love is an infant leviathan. Part leviathan, part Peacekeeper, and you can't help but feel like he's your own child, your fellow accidental fugitive and displaced soul. You named him Talyn because a man called Talyn may once have loved you.

You need to believe that Crais has changed, too, that he will care for Talyn. You imagine John might understand if you knew how to explain it to him, but you hardly understand yourself. You just can't believe you've let the only being you've ever loved fall into the hands of an enemy.

Out of range of the Peacekeeper scans, Moya's temperature is back at optimal, but you're still a little cold, your hair damp from bathing. You pull a blanket off of your bed and wrap it around you, curling closer to Moya. You taste her grief on the back of your tongue and mingle it with your own.


End file.
